Back in Black (27 page)

Cyn shoved her makeup back into her purse. “You're thinking about Scott.”

Anna took a moment to answer. Honesty. “Ben, actually.”

“What's up with that?”

“Nothing.” She was surprised at how the sadness of that confession hit her.

“You can't always get what you wa-ant.” Cyn teasingly sang the old Rolling Stones tune. Then she switched tunes. “And if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.”

“You don't believe that.

Cyn popped up from the couch, then reached a hand down toward Anna. “No. But it's a lot easier than saying that I feel like shit. And now I have to fly home on the same plane as him.”

“Change your flight.”

“You're a genius. And I'll get a massage and a facial, too.”

They hugged each other with the affection that only comes with a friendship where best friends have grown up together and know every little thing about each other. Many things made a good friend—someone you could talk to with a totally open heart. Shared interests. A person you loved to hang out with. Yet there was one more thing that should go on that list: history. It was irreplaceable.

“One more adventure for the Cyn-and-Anna chronicles,” Anna noted, giving her friend another squeeze. “I hate saying good-bye to you.”

“Puh-leeze,” Cyn scoffed, stepping back from her friend. “It's never good-bye for us. And it never will be. Right?”

“Absolutely,” Anna assured her. At a moment that was all about honesty, that was nothing but the truth.

“So, Vegas was quite the experience,” Sam stated as the limo started to pull away from the hotel. The rain had slackened to a drizzle, but the Palms still looked defeated in the gloom, like a showgirl who'd slept until noon after spending the night with a stranger. “Who wants champagne?”

Anna wasn't sure that going to pick up Dee at the hospital was a champagneworthy moment, but she didn't say anything. Everyone was coping in their own way. After they got Dee, they'd hit the freeway back to Los Angeles, where they'd take her to Cedars-Sinai and get her checked in.

“We
so
need a soundtrack right now.” Cammie rooted through the box of CDs that Sam had brought along as the limo waited to pull onto Flamingo Road.

“How about the Ramones' ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’?” Adam suggested.

“Sick.” Cammie laughed. “I love that about you. How about this?”

She slipped a CD into the player and pushed play. She craned her neck toward Adam. “The Donnas. Great band.”

He pulled her close and kissed her; then they gazed into each other's eyes. Anna had no idea who the Donnas were, or why Cammie's playing their music suddenly made Adam so happy. She was just amazed that after their true confessions, they were still a couple obviously in love.

Love. What was it, really? How did you know when you were in it? She wanted to tap Adam on the shoulder and ask him, since he seemed in such bliss. She'd read somewhere that being in love produced endor-phins that caused a natural high. Did anyone ever stay in that kind of love? Certainly her parents hadn't. She searched her mind for a long-term couple who still seemed to be really, truly in love. Definitely not Ben's parents. According to Ben, his mother was having a nervous breakdown over his father's gambling. So now that he was in Gamblers Anonymous, could she fall back in love with him again? Or maybe when love was badly damaged, a couple could never really recover.

If only there were a love version of the money-back guarantee. Then if you fell hard, as she had with Ben, and it didn't work out, your mind would simply erase the experience from your memory and you'd be brand-new again, without that wound on your heart or the scar tissue that formed around it.

Anna sighed and sank back into the petal-soft leather upholstery. Parker and Sam were sharing a single flute of champagne; which seemed odd, since there were certainly enough flutes to go around. Hadn't Sam said that Parker had hit on her? If he was doing it again, why was she letting him? Meanwhile, Cammie had climbed onto Adam's lap and they were furiously making out. In the past Adam had not been a fan of

PDA—public displays of affection. Yet here he was, definitely PDAing.

Anna turned to take one last look back at the Palms. She could certainly file this under New Experiences, and, after all, that had been what she'd wanted. Of course, she hadn't planned on Dee's break with reality. Who knew who the real Dee was?

She saw a taxi pull up to the hotel entrance.

Anna's heart flipped, leaped, somersaulted, then somersaulted again as the limo began turning right onto Flamingo Road.

“Stop!” she bellowed. “Stop the limo!”

The driver slammed on the brakes; everyone jerked forward.

“What the hell, Anna?” Cammie demanded.

But Anna was already out the door, running back to the entrance of the Palms. Ben turned and saw her.

Stratosphere

“H
i,” Anna uttered softly. Finally, after all this time, they were standing face-to-face. Her heart was pounding and her knees felt weak, her breathing shallow and clammy. Her luggage was at her feet and the limo gone, having made a U-turn to bring it to her before departing again. There was absolutely no turning back.

“I came for you. Is that good?”

She tried to form a complete sentence. But words—the ally of her life—would not come to her. All she could manage was, “Very.”

People were going to and fro all around, in and out of the hotel and casino, taxis pulling up and departing, a tour bus emptying out. Anna and Ben just stood there, their eyes locked. It wasn't until a valet told them that they had to move that they went inside. Anna stood by as Ben checked himself in and got a key card for his standard room on the seventh floor. Anna was grateful for the distraction. She was so nervous and so over whelmed to be in his presence again that she still could hardly put two words together.

They rode the elevator in silence, got out on floor seven, and went together to room 714. It was well appointed but nothing special, with striped wallpaper and a king-size bed. Ben slung his small gray knapsack onto the floor and then sat on the edge of the bed. That was when Anna got a sudden flash: He was wearing jeans and a Princeton T-shirt—exactly what he'd had on when Anna had seen him for the first time, diagonally across the aisle from her in the first-class cabin of the flight from La Guardia Airport to LAX. He'd stood and pulled off his sweatshirt to reveal a V-cut hard body. Short brown hair, electric blue eyes, tall and rangy—Anna had immediately paid attention. Half an hour later, they'd been thisclose to joining the Mile-High Club in the first-class lavatory. It had been such an un-Anna Percy thing to do. It was also a cherished memory.

“You're wearing what you wore that first day.” She sat on a chair across from him, not trusting herself to be next to him on the bed.

“On purpose.”

She smiled, feeling slightly less like she'd need a defibrillator at any moment. “Why didn't you tell me you were coming?”

Ben scratched his chin. “I thought I'd surprise you. And … I don't know. I hate talking on the phone about anything serious. Why did everyone leave? Your message said you guys were all staying until tomorrow.”

“That was the plan.” Anna briefly told him about Dee.

“Wow,” Ben muttered. “Someone in that triumvirate was bound to crack eventually. Sam, Cammie, Dee—we're not talking stable. But then, who the hell is?”

Indeed. Anna studied Ben's face—same startling blue eyes, same heart-shaped mouth, same soft lips. It took her breath away, just as it had the very first moment she'd set eyes on him, on the plane to Los Angeles. She remembered that Jane Austen had first titled
Pride and Prejudice
something else—
First Impressions
. Ben had made a wondrous first impression. Second impression, too.

“Were you glad I called?” Anna asked.

“Of course. God, Anna, you must know that.”

Silence. Her eyes flitted from him to the tapestry bedspread, to the window, and back to him. If they sat here any longer, she was going to spring across the room and in about two seconds they'd be in that bed, naked. She was that powerfully attracted to him. But she had to be honest with herself: That wasn't what she wanted. Yet.

“You know what? There's this place called the Stratosphere that's supposed to have the best view of Vegas,” Anna suggested, thinking it would be a good place to talk—better than any of the noisy restaurants downstairs, and offering less temptation than the close proximity of a hotel room. That was what she really wanted to do. To talk. Or at least that was what she told herself. “I read about it in one of the Vegas guides, and Sam and I were planning to go, but we never got around to it. Want to?”

She could not tell what he was thinking.

“Sure, why not?”

The Stratosphere was another hotel and casino, this one located at the eastern end of the Strip. Its claim to fame was a Space Needle–like tower that jutted high into the sky, more than a thousand feet above the city. It was reputed to be the tallest observation tower in the country, and the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. The elevator ride to the top took thirty-five seconds. There was a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree indoor/outdoor observation area at the top, plus a restaurant and bar. To complete the Stratosphere experience, there were a series of sky-high thrill rides designed to make passengers think that they actually might be flung off the tower and down to the asphalt below.

The place was packed, even at noontime. Anna heard several different languages being spoken, and the line for the thrill rides was already quite long. There had been a fortuitous break in the weather; the rain had stopped, and the sun was fighting its way through the clouds.

Anna was standing by the glass window, looking back toward the Strip and out at the sprawl that was contemporary Las Vegas. Beyond that was the endless desert. She'd seen the same view from Brock's mansion. But what stunned her now was the huge amount of residential development. This was a big city, where regular people lived in regular houses and went to regular jobs. She found that comforting. The glitz and the glory of the Strip was great, even energizing. But it was nice to know that real people lived here too.

Ben slipped an arm around her waist. “What a view, huh?”

“Yeah.” She leaned into him and thought about how fantastic it would be to soar out into the blue. “Dee once asked me if I'd rather be invisible or be able to fly.”

“Easy. Fly.” Ben smiled. “Up over all the shit. Over my parents, my school … Works for me.”

She pressed her hands against his arms and turned her head to look at him. “Is school shit?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes it's great.” He touched her hair above the nape of her neck. “Is that really what you want to do, talk about Princeton?”

No. She leaned forward and kissed him softly, right next to his mouth. Then suddenly their lips were together, and it all came rushing back—lust at thirty thousand feet with a boy she'd just met. Even now, after everything they'd shared, Anna still wasn't sure that she really knew Ben.

She pulled away, breathless.

“Let's go back to the hotel,” he whispered into her hair.

“I don't … I'm not …”

“You want me to make love to you, Anna.”

Very true. But that had been their mistake in the first place: too much, too fast.

“I do want you,” she admitted hastily. “That's never been a problem.”

“So then—”

“I don't know if we're … I didn't invite you here for sex.”

He raised a wry eyebrow. “What, then? This view?”

“That's not what I … What I want is …”

“You want this,” he insisted, and pulled her close again. When he kissed her, everything melted. Maybe that was why she'd fallen for him so hard, so fast. Because she was always so much in her head, and Ben took her someplace else entirely. But she knew that if they went back to the hotel and fell into each other's arms, they'd still have to face each other afterward. So she decided to face it all now instead and edged away from him, telling herself to be honest and let the chips fall where they might. How apt for Sin City.

“I'm confused,” Anna said simply.

“By what? Me?”

“Somewhat. After you went back to Princeton, I thought it was the best thing.”

“So did I, at least for a while.”

“I even tried to meet some other guys. A TV producer, a surfing instructor …”

Ben's smile was open. “Sounds like you went for the full Los Angeles experience. Next you need to date one of the Lakers.”

Anna shook her head. “I don't like guys that tall.”

“What happened with all these—well, what were they? You're talking like they were experiments.”

“They were, in a way,” Anna told him, as a huge family in matching touristy Las Vegas T-shirts approached the window next to them, so close that she and Ben had to edge back toward the entrance. “Because in the end, it never worked out.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“I could never get you out of my head. Somehow, I knew we weren't over. At least, that's what my heart was saying.” Her eyes searched his. “Does that make any sense at all?”

“Yeah.”

“Your turn,” Anna said, feeling incredibly unburdened. It hadn't been easy to be that honest, but it had been worth it. “What happened to you at Princeton?”

An announcement over the Stratosphere speaker system touted the newest and scariest ride, something called Insanity. Ben had to wait for the announcement to end before he could answer. “No more lies?”

“Right,” she agreed. “No more lies.”

He exhaled loudly. “I'm seeing someone at school.”

Anna felt the blood drain from her face, surprised at how much the news hurt her. “So I guess your father was wrong, then.”

“About?”

“Never mind. No. Not never mind. I'm going to tell you.” She peered down at the city again, wondering if there was someone else down there who was getting the same kind of devastating news that she was getting up here, at the exact same time. It was possible. Somewhere out there in the big world, it was actually probable. “I ran into your dad at an Oscar party. He said you still cared about me. A lot. So what is it? You came to Las Vegas so that we could hook up? Cheating on—what's her name, anyway?”